Hosted in partnership with Bertha Doc House this one-off screening will be followed by a Panel Discussion. Speakers include historian and founding director of the Gomidas Institute Ara Sarafian; Prof. Marc Baer, author and historian of the Ottoman Empire at LSE; and Dr Carla Garapedian (consulting producer, Intent to Destroy; associate producer The Promise).

Book tickets here: http://dochouse.org/cinema/screenings/intent-destroy-qa

The screening will take place at the Curzon Bloomsbury cinema.

Holding a cane in his right hand, Movses Haneshyan, 105, slowly approaches a life-size landscape.

He pauses, looks at the image, and begins to sing: “My home… My Armenia.”

It’s the first time Movses is seeing his home in 98 years.

A century ago, on the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, one and a half million of them were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country.

The picture Movses is looking at is taken by Armenian-American photographer Diana Markosian. She travelled to Armenia to meet Movses and other survivors, to ask them about their last memories of their early home. She then retraced their steps in Turkey to retrieve a piece of their lost homeland.

She will be joining us in conversation with Fiona Rogers, global business development manager at Magnum Photos International & founder of Firecracker, to show her work and share the stories of the survivors she met who, 100 years on, still remember their home.

Diana Markosian is an Armenian-American photographer whose work explores the relationship between memory and place. She received her master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism at 20. Her work has since taken her to some of the most remote corners of the world, where she has worked on both personal and editorial work. Her images can be found in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker and Time Magazine. Her work is represented by Reportage by Getty Images.

l-r: Charles Glass, Sigrid Rausing, Janine di Giovanni

On Tuesday 5 May, Middle East editor of Newsweek Janine di Giovanni and veteran broadcaster and journalist Charles Glass joined an audience at the Frontline Club for an insightful discussion chaired by Sigrid Rausing, editor of Granta magazine.

Reflecting on the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and the human realities of war, di Giovanni and Glass discussed their recent contributions to the latest edition of Granta: The Map is Not the Territory, which explores the distinctions between representation and reality.

“The theme that comes to me over and over when I think of Iraq is loss,” said di Giovanni. Her article, After Zero Hour, looks back on her time reporting on the Iraq conflict, remembering old friends who have since disappeared, emigrated or fled.

Di Giovanni described driving the length and width of Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, aware that, as the impending war approached, many of the places she visited would soon cease to exist.

She read an extract from After Zero Hour: “With that invasion and the insurgent war that followed, Iraq would virtually disappear. The land of date trees, oasis and desert would be marked by checkpoints and graves.”

Glass followed with a short extract from his article, The Battle of Kessab, which examines the fate of the eponymous town in Syria. Kessab was the last remaining Armenian town in Syria, after the Turkish army relinquished control of portions of its border with Syria to Islamist rebels in 2014.Rausing responded to the reading: “What you describe so beautifully in the piece is really the context of the Armenian genocide. How everything that happens reminds people of the original genocide.”

An audience member asked Glass and di Giovanni to comment on the importance of lyrical writing in journalistic articles.

“We have the great privilege of writing poetically for Granta,” said di Giovanni. “For me, writing in a lyrical way in terms of narrative and characterisation is much easier.”

“This kind of language is so important,” said Rausing. “It’s the only kind of writing that will endure and have a life after.”

The discussion then covered the role played by journalists in stimulating positive political change, by providing on-the-ground evidence that can filter into policymaking.

“In some sense there’s a limit to what journalism can do. We can bring awareness, we can tell the story,” said di Giovanni. “The gap between reporting and policymaking is huge… there is an enormous gap between what is happening in the Security Council and in Obama’s office and what is actually happening on the ground. And that is hugely frustrating.”

A final audience question discussed the role of long-form journalism and an increased focus on human stories to encourage empathy and eliminate compassion fatigue.

“For the most part newspapers don’t have space… there are very few outlets. Thank god these things exist, but it’s hard to make a living doing that,” said Glass, highlighting Granta, The New York Review of Books and The Guardian as some of the few publications that champion longer pieces.

“For me it always comes down to the people,” said di Giovanni. “Then you could weave in the humanitarian disaster, you could get the political involvement in it, you could bring in the diplomacy… but I think it’s coming back. I think people want to read longer pieces.”

Subscribe to Granta magazine here.